Many don't vote because they do care.

So, here I am again, with just a few days to go in the election campaign, wondering if I’m actually going to be able to compel my body to enter a polling booth, and force my hand to make an X. Well, if I can’t do this seemingly simple thing, don’t dismiss me, or the millions of other nonvoters in Canada, as apathetic. We’re not. In fact, someone told me just the other day that I was one of the most pathetic people they’ve ever known. And it remains my conviction that we have, right here in Canada, some of the most pathetic people in the world. No, I’m a representative of a growing, non-visible minority that’s angry, discouraged, confused and tired, but still cares enough to refuse to use their vote to legitimize the nonsense we call an election in this country.

A number of years ago Kim Campbell was scorned and ridiculed because she said she couldn’t talk about policy in the middle of an election campaign. – At least, this is how what she said was spun. I doubt that even she can recall what she actually said. – But, what she seemed to be trying to say was painfully obvious to everyone. Every time anyone tries to raise a serious issue in an election campaign, the spin doctors and media reduce it to a series of meaningless sound-bites for their own purposes.

If concerns about our justice system are raised, people are variously accused of wanting to lock up 14 year olds for life, or of wanting to coddle and reward child molesters and wife abusers. If government funding for the arts comes up, it becomes a contest over who “cares” more about culture and starving artists. And, in the midst of what may be the worst economic challenge since the great depression, rather than having a serious, respectful discussion of economics and the place of government intervention in the marketplace, the whole thing gets reduced to whether one leader is keeping his plan under his sweater, or another has no plan and is making it up as he goes along. And the whole thing becomes more like a junior high school, student union election, than the election of a national parliament.

Who looked most prime-ministerial? Was Dion able to impress English speakers? Did Elizabeth May exceed expectations? Who got the “zinger” in the debate? When it comes to these questions serious voters are apathetic. What we want to know is that somebody out there has some serious answers to some serious questions. We don’t expect anyone to always have the right answer, but we want to have a serious discussion.

I believe we need to give some focused attention to the state of our democracy, and we might well begin by investigating the whole matter of falling voter turn-out rather than just dismissing it as apathy. I think we need to establish a series of forums, with people who can bring serious, nonpartisan reflection to the question of why there is so little substantive discussion going on in this country. And the media need to ask some searching questions about their own complicity in the dumbing down of politics in Canada.

Of course, some may say you can’t stop this nonsense. That may well be so. But it’s not really the nonsense that’s the problem. It’s the lack of sensible debate that should also be happening. In other words, if we can’t make it stop snowing, we can at least keep plowing.

And some may say that elections have always been this way. Again, this may be so. But many things were the way they’d always been till someone fixed them. Perhaps it’s time to fix this mess.